“Parable Life”
Psalm 126 and Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
7/9/23
31 He told another parable to them: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and planted in his field. 32 It’s the smallest of all seeds. But when it’s grown, it’s the largest of all
33 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast, which a woman took and hid in a bushel of wheat flour until the yeast had worked its way through all the dough.”
44 “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that somebody hid in a field, which someone else found and covered up. Full of joy, the finder sold everything and bought that field.
45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. 46 When he found one very precious pearl, he went and sold all that he owned and bought it.
47 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that people threw into the lake and gathered all kinds of fish.48 When it was full, they pulled it to the shore, where they sat down and put the good fish together into containers. But the bad fish they threw away. 49 That’s the way it will be at the end of the present age. The angels will go out and separate the evil people from the righteous people, 50 and will throw the evil ones into a burning furnace. People there will be weeping and grinding their teeth.
51 “Have you understood all these things?” Jesus asked.
They said to him, “Yes.”
52 Then he said to them, “Therefore, every legal expert who has been trained as a disciple for the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings old and new things out of their treasure chest.” (Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 – CEB)
One reason Jesus teaches in parables is because signs pointing to the kingdom of heaven are all around us.
The image of the kingdom as a mustard seed brings to mind children walking out of church with paper cups filled with a slurry of dark earth. Somewhere inside that muddy cup lies a tiny, drowning seed. I don’t know how many of those cups might have held mustard seeds, but North American Sunday school teachers who wanted to make a point similar to Jesus’ point needed to send the kids home with kudzu or English Ivy. For farmers in first-century Palestine, mustard plants were invasive and unwelcome.
It’s interesting. The story immediately preceding today’s string of pithy kingdom parables is the parable of the wheat and the weeds. By juxtaposing the wheat-and-weeds and the mustard seed parables, Matthew asks us to think very carefully about what we write off as weeds. Remember, that mustard plant, so vexing for farmers, creates a home for birds who not only aid in the propagation of crops, but whose plumage and song nourish us with awareness, joy, and gratitude—attributes which become a kind of yeast that leavens us for fuller living.
Yeast is another odd image for God’s household. Yeast is a fungus, a biochemical change agent that becomes part of the dough just as bread becomes part of the body that eats it. And while too little yeast has no effect, too much yeast causes food poisoning.
The yeast metaphor says that God is a subtle mystery transforming us from within. So, when even well-intentioned followers of Jesus try to impose rigid dogmas or ecclesiastical systems on other individuals or societies, it’s like too much yeast. It’s toxic.
In the parables of the hidden treasure and the perfect pearl, Jesus seems to compare God’s household to worldly wealth. And while I wince at comparing God’s realm of grace to anything suggesting materialism or greed, thanks to Cynthia Bourgeault,* I’m also beginning to understand Jesus as a wisdom teacher who is inviting us to listen with the ears of our heart—ears that hear beyond the limits of literal understanding and lead us toward not only deeper understanding, but toward the truer yearnings of the human heart. Those timeless and essential yearnings invite us to recognize and embrace our made-in-God’s-image selves. And that’s the treasure. That’s the pearl. When we begin to encounter that holy place deep within us—a place all human beings share—laying aside worldly and material distractions becomes possible.
“Again,” says Jesus “the kingdom of heaven is like a net.” In this parable—which is simply a recasting of the parable of the wheat and the weeds—only the good fish are kept. Of course, being a good fish means that you’ll be gutted, skewered on a spit, cooked over an open fire, and eaten. That kind of makes you re-think righteousness, doesn’t it?
Let’s remember, though, the comparison is to the net, not the fish. God’s household of grace is that which gets cast into our depths in order to gather in the holy and community-building gifts that lie beneath the surface. And those parts of us that remain selfish, violent, exclusive, and otherwise unkind, that gets thrown away.
Again, the invitation is to look within ourselves and to encounter God’s transforming presence and strength. That means that Jesus’ parables usually put us at odds with pride and individualism, at odds with the cultures and ideologies of the nations we love, and at odds with groups that give us identity. And that can include the Church.
Many of us feel grave concern over the Church’s decline. And we can cast nets of blame into the waters and haul in all sorts of culprits, and yet the most liable “bad fish” is the Church itself. Far too often the Church has proved itself more concerned with constructing grand buildings than communities of welcome and belonging, more concerned with protecting wealth than committing it to ministry, more concerned with holding power than advocating for the powerless, and, especially, more concerned with trying to decide for God who’s “in” and who’s “out.” If the Church is struggling, I think it’s because we have gotten too accustomed to favored relationships with wealth and violent power to follow our calling to love as we are loved.
God calls and equips the Church to discover its inner treasure, and to become mustard seed, yeast, and net. And when we fail to embrace that vocation, then by the deepest, most radical and unsettling grace, God will use other means to reveal God’s kingdom. God will work through other people, many of whom “good” church folk fear and despise.
Still, when the Church confesses and resists our addictions to entitlement and privilege, we can become the subversive weed Jesus plants in the creation. We can become the yeast the Spirit hides with carefully-measured breaths within the nations. We can become part of the wide net God casts into the world not to judge, but to gather in all whom God loves. And that leaves out no one.
The Church is not God’s realm. It’s merely a witness to God’s new reality of peace, non-violent justice, and diverse community being revealed through life itself, and through human parables living lives of compassion and joy. Wherever householders reach into our storehouses of ancient spiritual wisdom, and of ongoing spiritual experience, we continue to reveal God’s re-freshing holiness even in that which appears old, tired, and irrelevant.
I’m going to close with Psalm 126. Listen to the delight of the psalmist who describes God’s grace which has surprised him with abundance and hope in a world that had seemed to be defined by scarcity and fear. And as you listen, know that, even now, the same God cares for and calls us—the same God parables us—toward faithfulness and wholeness.
When the Lord changed Zion’s circumstances
for the better,
it was like we had been dreaming.
2 Our mouths were suddenly filled with laughter;
our tongues were filled with joyful shouts.
It was even said, at that time, among the nations,
“The Lord has done great things for them!”
3 Yes, the Lord has done great things for us,
and we are overjoyed.
4 Lord, change our circumstances for the better,
like dry streams in the desert waste!
5 Let those who plant with tears
reap the harvest with joyful shouts.
6 Let those who go out,
crying and carrying their seed,
come home with joyful shouts,
carrying bales of grain!
(Psalm 126 - CEB)
1Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—a New Perspective on Christ and His Message.” Shambala, 2008.
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